A researcher in US thinks he might have finally found evidence of humanity's sixth sense - the ability to detect, in some subconscious way, Earth's magnetic field.

The ability to sense Earth's magnetic field has been confirmed in birds, insects, and some mammals, which they use to migrate and orient themselves with the world around them, and now geophysicist Joe Kirschvink from the California Institute of Technology says he's identified it in humans for the first time.

Best of all, Kirschvink claims his results can be repeated and verified - something that previous experiments hinting at our magnetic sense - or magnetoreception - have failed to do.

"My talk went really well," Kirschvink told Eric Hand from Science magazine after presenting his results in April at the 2016 meeting of the Royal Institute of Navigation in the UK. "Nailed it. Humans have functioning magnetoreceptors."

To be clear, Kirschvink has so far only presented the results of a very small trial involving 24 participants, and he's still in the process of writing up the paper, so nothing has been peer-reviewed as yet.